


ALCHEMY

by heartbone (ergo_existence)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, CONTENT WARNING:, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Sex, Smut, whatever term you prefer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 22:24:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9682886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ergo_existence/pseuds/heartbone
Summary: Alchemy is the relentless pursuit of attempting to transform base metals into gold. It is a thankless and ultimately useless ritual. One cannot deny the intrinsic nature of an object, no matter how much one attempts to defy it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> If you have read CIRCADIAN RHYTHM by me then i would like to tell you: this is the antithesis to it. i wanted to challenge myself. this was about stretching my own boundaries.
> 
> i spent a lot of meditative time on this fic, and i'm hesitant but a little excited to share it. this was my first time, ever, writing 'proper' smut. i'm not often comfortable with it, because i feel it needs to be handled tenderly. as one would a lover, i suppose.
> 
> whilst you may know me as verbose, i think this speaks for itself, weirdly enough.
> 
> NOTE: 'la petite mort' is french for 'a little death', an expression roughly describing the ascension found through orgasm.

### PAUSE

 

 

The amount of times they have sex between Lestallum and Cape Caem is just enough to satiate Noctis, even if he has Venus flytraps for fingers and would have Prompto everyday if he could. One time he tries to play chance and runs a hand with wild abandon down Prompto’s side in the dark tent, but he can’t tell if he likes it, so he stops. The contact was enough to make him start thinking, though, and that was dangerous.

Occasionally, he’d catch Prompto looking at him or he’d watch him fall in a fight and he can’t think. He can’t think.

Cape Caem is a beginning, and an end. Noctis has learnt to live with the dichotomy of _king_ and _boy,_ but they are the same, and he cannot deny this, as much as he thrashes against that notion.

From the boat they take he will be on the path of kinghood properly and he cannot turn away from the union. Before the boat, he loses the rest.

The whole situation is surreal, how it’s fallen out of his control, how he’s rooted to the spot as an ancient tree pressed into the land and he can’t change it and there were thousands of variations of things he could have said or done and he, this time, has selected none of them.

Noctis’ arms are pressed close to his side in a defensive position, like a hunted animal, as if he were the victim. Not the one who agreed to this and walked into it with all the forethought of a king with a concrete fate and wild, rebellious abandon. Except the thing he needs to drive home is that whilst he is unwilling, deep down in the deepest of wells, to bear the deadly burden of king, he knows that Prompto cannot live in this flux. Or he does now.

“You can’t even _say_ it. You won’t even admit it, Noct,” Prompto bites, and it’s not sharp, but it’s to the point—the point of a knife against his skin.

They don’t argue, as a rule: Noctis can hardly remember a time where they’ve ever disagreed or lived with brewing aggression, and it’s the strangest thing to think that had they never crossed a line they would not be a wheeling disaster. It was only so long before this happened.

“Here’s what hurts,” Prompto says, and his voice sounds a little bit broken and a little bit hurt but he appears undefeatable, despite. “I made this mistake. I guess I thought we could something, and it’d, I dunno, work out to something more? We could try, even if I had to look Lunafreya in the eye and know you’d want me more than her. But it didn’t.”

There’s a lit match. The lit match is Prompto. “You knew I couldn’t…Prompto, don’t—you know.”

The harshest of laughs escapes him, and suddenly, Noctis looks at him, the same way he had in Prompto’s kitchen and had taken with hedonistic and youthful abandon: he does not recognise this. He wants to make it better, he wants another chance, he wants to give Prompto all he deserves and he can do none of it. He is one of the most powerful people in all of Eos with magic making a home beside his heart and here he stands weaponless and weak.

"Just tell me. Do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Do you lo—nevermind," Prompto says, and all at once that statement unpacks the rest of everything they have done and it's like once they give it form, it will all shatter, because it is a reality that cannot exist. It is a reality no other can know. "We can’t do this. I know I said I wanted to, to start with, but Noct. Someone’s gotta check out, and if anyone can walk out of this with a smile, it’s gonna be me.”

“Will it be real?” Noctis manages to say, and he can only just hold Prompto’s eye contact. It bounces between them, the things they had shared, in that space.

“Smoke and mirrors, baby.”

“Don’t.” Shaking his head, he looks away, because: there is a gaping mile between them, for however close they have always been. It is an unimaginable feeling, to hold this knowledge with burnt hands. “Can I just,” he starts to add, and he moves forward, trying to broach the chasm. Prompto doesn’t move, so he kisses him, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Because words have been forgotten, prehistoric specimen he is.

“Why don’t _you_ don’t,” Prompto says, pulling back, hands limp at his side. He hardly engages the kiss. “You can’t fix it with that. You can’t fix this, you can’t fix— _me_. ”

“You? What do you mean, fix _you_? We’ve been over this, Prompto, you know that it’s not you. You know you're fine just the way you are."

“No. It isn’t me,” Prompto replies, and that means something else— _no, it isn't me you..._ —a sentence Noctis cannot finish or acknowledge. Prompto swallows, the motion of his throat like watching Noctis’ own body move.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how do you mean it?”

“Prompto,” Noctis says, attempting to summon vigour, the right thing to say. It will not be enough. “There’s no way we come out of this with a happy ending. I don’t get to settle down.”

The moment bursts and he is standing in the fire and it is swelling up and there is nothing he can do. His hands are tied.

“Okay, no, I got this. This must be hard for you, too, and maybe I'm asking for too much."

“It's hard for me.” The volume raises in Noctis' voice but it's jagged, and he can’t help it, going from quiet to thundering. _He is trying_.

“I know it is. Do you think that makes it any easier for _me_?” Then he shakes his head, lovely and hurt. “It’s fine. We’ll get out of this, and we’ll find you a happy ending. Yeah? Princes are meant to have that.”

A happy ending without Prompto, is what the statement implies. Working under the assumption it’s not there in effervescent starkness, right before Noctis.

There’s a boundary they crossed some time ago when he swallowed Prompto whole, and then there’s another flag he passed he paid no attention to. This is the third. Where Prompto consumes him, all the same, and it’s over. He could hit all of Noctis’ weaknesses and this is the mercy that undoes him: that Prompto won’t. But he is pained, anyway, and Noctis wants to shake him and say _do it. You know where to hurt me._ Prompto could pull his intestines out and bury him to grow an orchard of memory and he would say ‘thank you’.

But he doesn’t. That is the cruellest, because he is not cruel.

“We go find Luna, we see the Astral, we stop this,” Prompto says, and he shakes his head, and the wayward sea surrounding them near the imposing lighthouse is a tease because he’s not drowning in those depths. There is oxygen in his lungs and he can’t breathe.

“Why?” he questions, raw and ripped.

Prompto purses his lips and looks away, and his eyelids flicker between blinking and being open. “Because, Noct. Best friends that joke with each other, that have known each other _forever—_ don’t let this get in the way.”

“Let what get in the way?”

Between the boundless air and grass and ocean, they are two figures caught in the orchestrated strings of Eos and Lucis and the throne. If he reaches his hands down into where this all emanates, then maybe he will discover what they are progressively working backwards to, propelled as elastic bands.

 

*

 

Ceasefire should mean peace for the prince of a warring nation built on torn asunder foundations.

For Noctis, it means something else entirely. It is a bitter thing.

The gala he slips out of is one he’d never attend on any day of the week willingly, but given the circumstances, he forgives the fact that there is such an event. That doesn’t mean he likes the boundless black backdrop or enjoys only seeing his father for a handful of minutes.

So he leaves after spending customary time there. The crown prince of Lucis is reclusive at best, actively antisocial at worst when it came to public appearances not revolving around social work. He stretches the assigned trait to its limits. Noctis slips through the air as blue velvet.

Where he goes is really no surprise but he tries to pretend it’s an accident. He shoots a text, _I'm coming over_ despite the fact he’s standing on Prompto’s doorstep. It took longer than he’d liked to change clothes from black to black except more comfortable, but now he stands resplendent.

The door opens.

“I honestly had no idea you’d be standing there. I was just gonna wait outside,” Prompto greets, and he’s surprised. His head cocks a little.

“I sent my text a little late,” Noctis says.

“You don’t say. Well, no point standing there like a lemon. Aren’t you supposed to be at the big do?”

Noctis steps in after him and removes his boots. Crossed arms and a slouched posture, Prompto leans against the bench in the barren kitchen, where there is debris of a missed existence of his parents’: Noctis knows Prompto refuses to eat multigrain bread, and that must be his mother’s, and there’s the tea he’s never seen him drink.

“Are your parents home?” he asks.

“Nah. It’s cool, though.”

“It’s pretty late.”

“This small talk is hurting me,” Prompto says. “You didn’t answer me, by the by. The gala thing. What’s going on with that?”

“I left. It was kinda boring.”

He hesitates in his reply and watches Noctis with a calculating stare. “You okay, dude?”

Noctis shrugs and looks away. He considers all the people celebrating, Insomnia alight with the knowledge the war is over, the prince engaged, and he, feeling driven out. He went to a regular school and had a best friend and he played normal. He played normality. But he was just that: an actor.

“Did I delude myself?” Noctis says, gaze caught on the enamel floor, sputtering out things he’s kept in all evening and all day and ever since he first, on his own, discovered he was bid to wed.

The emotion entering his tone rare—a confused lack of surety blended in a cocktail with a tinge of anger.

The moment stutters. Prompto opens his mouth, but no words come out as he seems to select his words, head moving this way and that. “Your dad wanted you to be as normal as you could be,” he replies.

“Right. But even if I went to the same high school as you, I was never the same.”

“Did that matter?” Suddenly, Noctis thinks the question is not about _Noctis_.

“I guess not to you,” he acquiesces to the unvoiced reference. A somewhat sad yet wry smile graces Prompto’s face, and it’s like that image of him condenses a lungful of seconds into one shattering realisation. There is a portrait of Prompto’s crossed arms, the way his figure looked graceful in motion, the oddly sombre gaze. The essence of the moment is captured and given framed life.

He hungers.

It’s like a switch. An outpouring. Unabashedly tearing down the carefully maintained walls of stoicism in the face of his heritage and death and duty.

“I don’t want to marry Lunafreya,” he says, and there he can feel the meaning of that from his untouched lips and untamed hips.

“You don’t want to marry _Lady Lunafreya_?” Prompto says, quickly in turn, and he looks shocked at the concept. As if the conversation had not been leading up to this.

“No.”

“Then,” Prompto says, and thinks, spending more time on his words in the whole conversation longer than he ever has in years of friendship. “Some kings keep mistresses, y’know.”

“I don’t _want_ mistresses.”

“So you want—”

“Men,” Noctis finishes for him, because he needs to spell it out.

“And your dad doesn’t know?”

“The war between the Imperial army and Lucis has _ended,_ Prompto. I can’t…”

Prompto shakes his head and moves off from the counter to meet Noctis’ hard eyes. “I still don’t think you need to make a sacrifice like that.”

“That’s politics. That’s being prince,” he says, shrugging his shoulders like a marionette. Such is the weight of the Wall.

“So why’d you come here? Why didn’t you just stay behind, Noct?” The question is oddly accusative, like Prompto’s on the offensive, like Noctis doesn’t just come here sometimes to be quiet.

“I couldn’t think of anywhere else,” is the only truth he can share. It is. There’s nowhere else he’d go, when something like this is happening. There’s an intrinsic part of him that called here, if he tried to describe it, one he cannot shake.

Before he knows it Prompto is sauntering up in front of him, posture fluid as water, head tilted in a way that might be playful but he doesn’t look it. There are burgeoning thoughts inside Noctis that tell him that he came here because he knew the path as a line on the fleshy inner side of his hands and he’d willingly let Prompto trace those parts.

He stands on the crux of a thing he cannot fathom yet understands it innately.

If he wanted to think of it, he could remember the familiar loving frown on Regis’ face as he felt the spark of kindred energy slide through the hall out to the exit. If he wanted to.

He just wants to kiss Prompto and let himself tumble into something he cannot control. Prompto slides a hand onto his shoulder, then, and he wears a nostalgic and sombre expression. It’s heavy.

“Just tell me to stop, okay?” he says.

Noctis doesn’t know how they moved from standing in the kitchen to kissing in the kitchen, but like all things veering wildly out of control, there is not much of a coherent way to trace it.

When Prompto pulls back from the movement, he pauses in his retreat and says, “I wasn’t sure what you were angling for, but I guessed.”

Prompto has read Noctis before Noctis himself has even reached the same conclusion, as much as it’s been banging against his forehead. “I’m going to be married.”

“I know,” Prompto says, “but it’s a while.”

And he’s right. It is a while before he does, and it’s a while before he leaves, and he could while away the time with something that at least makes him feel. That the act itself, of feeling, could be an idea to cling to: that scares him.

This doesn’t.

“And until then?” Noctis' query comes from a place of asking to be led than as much to check.

“Then I guess we can just do this.”

He forgets the shape of the room, and how to assert control over his body, or tell his eyes to close their lids, because Prompto has two hands on his neck with another human heat joining his and an inviting kiss. A kiss saying: _let’s try this,_ in the way that lips speak without sound.

Sneaking back, Prompto says, “You have to move your lips a bit.”

“Yeah, I know,” Noctis says, because he does, he just doesn’t know how to connect the intensity of the sensation to the need to contribute his part of the transaction. “How do _you_ now?”

“Um, I looked it up once or twice? Obviously? Like everybody did.”

“I don’t know if everybody looks online to see how to kiss people properly. Why _were_ you even doing that?”

Prompto hesitates cutely for a moment. “Pays to be prepared, Noct. Besides,” he then says with a mischievous smile, “I was your first, wasn’t I?”

“Have you seen me with anyone else?”

“Then you did okay,” Prompto says, and grins even further, stretching wide and he is flushed and brilliant. “Lick your lips.”

“You could do that for me.” It escapes Noctis before he knows it.

“Smooth.”

In what is, in retrospect, an incredibly filthy manoeuvre, Prompto does exactly as Noctis suggested. Kissing open-mouthed with none of the grace of a gazelle, Noctis’ dry lips are lathered in saliva by a weaponised tongue and, just like that, Noctis puts himself into the kiss.

He tilts his head slightly, mirroring Prompto’s arch, and he lets his hands drift to the spot that enthrals him: Prompto’s shoulders, the breadth of them contrasting to his cut waist. He is enamoured of the sight and feel of it.

“Your parents,” he says, pulling back for breath, the air between them heavy with the tang of a monumental step in a direction they can never return.

“You think that’s something to worry about.” Prompto grins, and pushes Noctis. “Tell me what you wanna do, and I’ll tell you if I think we have enough time ‘til they come. Or we do.”

“Sex puns.”

“They’re starting now. You can’t stop me.”

“I want to suck you off.”

Loudly, Prompto groans like a child and says, “Okay, so is that the punishment for my innuendo?”

Noctis runs his fingers through his hand and feels sweat on his forehead. The room is stifling, so he slides his jacket off and throws it on the counter.

“Are you doing a strip-tease?” Prompto whispers. “I think I just died and went to heaven. That’s it, you’ve won, dude. ”

“No? I got hot.”

“Of course you got hot, you’re hot, you’re always hot. You got hot when you hit puberty.”

Noctis forgot, somewhere along the line, Prompto would have to find him attractive to consider the prospect of sex. Or making out. He catches up hastily. With a new perspective, he looks down at himself and back up at Prompto with the knowledge that there, their bodies stand disparate, but they will move together. They want to move together.

The prospect makes his shoulder sit tense with anticipation, and makes his own image feel new. He could do anything.

So he kisses Prompto and the kiss is hot because bodies are like that, and they kiss, and they kiss, and he lets his hands wander to grip Prompto’s lower half, to feel the sinew lines of muscle and grasp it with fervency.

“My bedroom would be a good idea.” Prompto pants, exerted. He palms away some of Noctis’ fringe, and it’s an oddly fond and dear gesture. For a second, Noctis’ heart trips.

“That’s where people usually do it.”

“You actually have no idea as to what to do, do you? Bro, I’m so glad we’re in the same boat."

"Is that a challenge?"

"Is having sex a challenge?"

Noctis considers. "Maybe it might be for you."

“I want to say so much,” Prompto cuts in, “but I kind of want to watch your lips around my dick, because it seems like a pretty great idea.”

Noctis gulps. “I don’t…disagree. When did you get so dirty?”

“You lit a _fire_ inside me. I’m an untameable man-beast. Hear me roar.”

Prompto weakly roars.

Grabbing Prompto’s wrist, accidentally grabbing more of his cuff than skin, Noctis adjusts his grip and starts his march beyond to Prompto’s bedroom. Each step is filled with terrific urgency.

“You could have laughed,” Prompto says. “You _usually_ laugh.”

“ _Usually,_ ” Noctis says, “I’m not about to give you a blowjob.”

Prompto sighs, fake-morosely. “So sad a boy can’t have both.”

“Get on the bed,” Noctis directs, because he thinks he can navigate his way through his first of firsts with enough kingly intention. He watches with building need as Prompto gets on the bed. “And take off your shirt.”

Prompto takes off his shirt, and just like that, Noctis sees him—his nipples and myriad beauty marks. It is personal, and makes his stomach twist. He wants this. Desperately. Then, without guidance, Prompto—not even a smirk on his face—takes the rest of his clothes off. There’s something about the act of removal, not just the baring of skin, which speaks to Noctis: there is a routine to the gesture that makes him look at Prompto from a different angle.

He is naked. From his bony feet and legs dotted with freckles to the uninterrupted, asking flow of his body.

“I didn’t know you needed to get all the way undressed just for this,” Noctis says, to try to balance his sudden nervousness, acknowledgement of the intimacy.

“I wanted to,” Prompto replies, simply.

“I’m not complaining.”

“You know you’re not supposed to awkwardly stand there.”

“Just enjoying the view.”

“That’s cliché,” Prompto says, grinning. He leans back on the bed. “How would you like me now, prince?”

Noctis groans a little. The room is one they have spent time in before, and it feels regular, and normal, as if the war did not end and the floor is still the same shade and the light enters the room the same way it does at this time of year and the sheets, he knows, will still smell musky with sweat.

But there is Prompto, waiting on the bed.

“Could you pass me a pillow?”

Dutifully, Prompto passes one, and scoots over to the end of the bed where he seems to have figured out what Noctis is thinking.

“Don’t hurt your knees,” Prompto says.

“Don’t intend on it.”

With some brief navigation, Noctis lowers himself in front of Prompto. From this angle, he’s looking up at Prompto. Their gaze locks. Prompto swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. That sets Noctis off, and so he spits into his hand, a motion he is used to, and raises his ungloved hand to Prompto’s cock.

His actual dick. Cock. Penis. Noctis is struggles to put two and two together as he feels the firmness of it, tries to familiarise himself with the length and breadth and space.

Prompto is silent, but he breathes heavily, and between them that is the only sound.

Licking his lips, Noctis looks up again with hesitance, and Prompto, conscious of it or not, bites his lip. That encourages him. So, he makes the move, and opens his mouth. Devours half, and hits his limit. The taste on his tongue is the same as sweat or blood, distinctly human and guttural, and it makes him think about how simple and natural it is.

With his right hand he caresses the space his mouth cannot reach, and he assumes a pace that he believes to be reasonable, if the slight, keening noise Prompto makes is anything to go by. He’s an oddly quiet partner Up and down, eventually Prompto slides a soft hand into Noctis’ hair, slight pressure revealing Prompto to be running his hand around in lazy circles.

“Noctis,” Prompto says, and there: his name turns into a plea, or a curse, or a prayer, or a thing that comes before all of that, before any of it ever meant anything and there was one thing to be understood.

The way his mouth stretches to fit the weight of Prompto makes his cheeks feel rotund, his head different and new. The novelty may wear off, but the intimacy of this newfound hunger makes him feel old. New. All at once.

The red of Prompto’s face and his quietly murmured begging tells Noctis what to expect. He removes himself, and feels his tongue assume its own space with leisure, and lets his right hand presume urgency. It takes him aback when his face is covered in a mess but he finds he does not mind. Not if he goes by the look on Prompto’s face: half-awe, half-disbelief, some other amount that should not be mathematically possible—desire.

“I think you should get off too,” Prompto says, between quick breaths his lungs demand.

“I know,” Noctis agrees. His voice is rough, and alien, and he comes close to not recognising it as his own.

“So get off the ground.”

“Well, I do have to _get off_.”

“Dude, I just got blown to heaven, give me a moment.”

“I thought _I_ wasn’t the one laughing at your puns.”

Prompto leans down for a kiss meant more as confirmation than promise, but it keeps Noctis happy anyway.

“Y’know,” Prompto says, toying with the sore, stretched jaw of Noctis’, “you’re gonna have to check your phone. I bet it’s blown up with a thousand question marks from Gladio."

Shrugging and lifting himself up, Noctis wants to eschew responsibility. But he knows he can’t.

“You were right,” he says, turning to Prompto and noting with a thrill he hadn’t even dressed himself again.

“I’m always right, pal.”

“Oh, do I have to start listing times when you weren’t?”

Prompto laughs. He looks loose, a little bit like stretched taffy. Well-done and simmered and cooked, crystalline candy, played with and malleable. He tastes just as sweet.

Noctis has never felt this invincible, even as he grimaces at Gladio’s utter furore at Noctis’ prolonged absence. He shoots off a text that he hopes will stave off his attendants slash friends. It is, after all, the announcement of the engagement; he’s due home for a breakfast in the morning. That is later.

This is now.

But he looks at Prompto, and back down at his phone, and he thinks and double-thinks and doubts himself.

“We could do this again,” he says, and he’s not even done anything for himself. Except, in his dirty little heart, he wanted to know what it was like to hold that firmness in him, one way or another.

“And we’d be boning all the way to Lady Lunafreya’s wedding reception, right?”

They could. “Maybe not at the reception.”

Prompto flops on his back and lets his elbows free. “You’re gonna be the death of me.”

 

*

 

They’re walking around when the street lights hang low and amber and the city of Insomnia stays awake with bleached eyes. Prompto has his head caught up in cotton with his camera roll and Noctis, hands swaying beside him as they walk, doesn’t think about anything. It’s not required. When they stroll together like this after hours doing whatever they were doing before, he doesn’t need to be anything else.

 

*

 

He’s not ready, for tomorrow, but he is, all the same. Because it is something he must do and he doesn’t have the power not to.

Prompto’s packed kit bag sits swollen on the freshly cleaned floor. Noctis guesses at least half of it is accessories for his guns. Nonetheless, it will all easily fit into his blue wallet of space. After zipping it up, Prompto stands up with a sigh and a shrug of his shoulders.

“Excited?” he turns around and asks, eyebrows raised. In turn, Noctis can only look away in avoidance.  “Right,” Prompto mutters.

“Yeah.”

“Time just flew by, didn’t it,” he says. Time neither flew nor crawled. It simply, with the great insolence of a universal constant, passed on. Didn't bend.

They haven’t kissed or touched each other since the announcement of the engagement, the final sealed deal of Noctis’ and Lucis’ future. He keeps wanting to reach out, to make Prompto turn his eyes this way or that and kiss him steadily, but he doesn’t know how to ask.

That’s what’s going to be the end of him. The simple act of silence.

“D’you know,” Prompto says, trying to fill the gaps, crossing his legs on his bed with nonchalance, “when you think really hard you look dumb?”

Noctis squints.

“It’s the same way you look when you’re asleep.”

“Ha, ha,” he sounds out, turning a laugh into bite. He commits into the room properly, from leaning against the doorframe, and treads across in cold bare feet to join Prompto.

“It’s true,” Prompto says amiably.

“Thanks for watching me sleep, creeper.”

“Then fall asleep less.”

The presence of Prompto beside him is felt like an old wound. Except it doesn’t hurt. He can just appreciate the depth of the cut. If he does anything now he knows it won’t be the last, because all for the trip to Lunafreya he will keep saying to himself: _just one more time_ , and it will be like never leaving bed. It may exactly be like never leaving bed, with Prompto’s soft sleeping self beside him.

No one can know. He quite literally trusts Ignis and Gladio with his life but he cannot and will not breathe a word of this to anybody else—Prompto is his best friend, his one and only, most of the time, and he wants this to himself. Whatever it is.

“You look like you wanna kiss me, bro,” Prompto says, full of knowledge from the last time, and the _bro_ ruins the honeyed statement, but it’s Prompto all over.

“So do you,” Noctis replies, even though he can’t tell if Prompto wants to kiss him or not by the look on his face. He sees longing and resignation. If he’s to blame for the latter, then his tongue twists against his mouth with that knowledge.

He makes the terrible commitment, and breaks the distance with a kiss. Lips smacking. He doesn’t know how he went without this. Being close to Prompto is like being close to himself, discovering intrinsic things he should have known all along.

Their teeth clack, and Noctis says, “Sorry,” into Prompto’s mouth. He tries to soothe it with his tongue and he finds he likes doing that anyway. He likes feeling as if he could never go deep enough, always more to push through towards, to never understand or learn.

“What are we?” Prompto says, breaking away, urgent hands now falling from Noctis.

“I don’t know,” Noctis says, presently.

“Okay.” That hasty acceptance and half-grin is covering something. He doesn’t know what, but when he does, he has a sinking and drowning feeling it might just destroy him.

It doesn’t matter. He presses his lips against Prompto’s to banish the thought, a king sending a subject into exile.

Just as he’s about to lose himself Prompto gently handles him and pushes him back against the bed, nothing rough about the motion, giving and stealing all the same in its movement: Noctis opens up.

“Do you think this is a mistake?” he asks.

Prompto sits back on his haunches and stares at panting Noctis. There seems to be more room for the unsaid between them, than anything. It’s easier. “I think,” Prompto says, “I’ll take what I can get.”

He reasserts himself over Noctis’ prone form before anything else can be said. It’s their last time just together before the trip, and it hits him how much he procrastinated on seeing Prompto again _like this._ How much he puts things off and then realises, much too late, exactly what it means to him.

The night outside is lonely and dark. The room, ever less o.

Their chests touch and their legs tangle as thread. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he wants—craves, but to crave sounds like a whimsy. To dream or to want holds the connotations of silent, burning longing, and yes, he has wanted this, and yes, he wants.

When they stop curling around one another for a moment, Prompto says, words blurring, “Have you ever, y’know?”

It’s not much of a question. “Is ‘y’know’ code for some sexual act I’ve never heard of?”

“Ass stuff.”

“Why didn’t you just say that,” Noctis says.

“I don’t know if you’d get freaked out by ass stuff. Or jerking the gherkin.”

“Hold on,” Noctis says, “Jerking the gherkin?"

“You know. My penis,” Prompto says, gesturing to his penis, hidden beneath his pants.

“We already did that,” Noctis mutters, exasperated, then addresses the other part of Prompto’s statement. “And it's more like the opposite of getting freaked out, for me.”

“Like getting you _freaky_?”

“I think we’re already getting freaky?” He runs his hands up Prompto’s tank top in what is, in his opinion, a risky and thrilling move. He really can’t get over Prompto’s hips. Waist. The whole picture.

“You can’t just waltz into my bedroom and expect to be able to do it the first time, though.”

“I know,” Noctis says. He does at least know that.

“So long as we’re on the same track. Mostly. Considering how messed up a situation we’re already in.”

“Could you kiss me again?” He can, at least, voice this now.

They undress. They kiss. They do what lovers do. He thinks, if he knows what it is to be a king and rule a city and a land, then he knows twice as much about his own body from two times with Prompto than he ever learnt in twenty years. A king in court versus a boy in a bed. One is made and the other _is._

“So, um,” Noctis says, naked below Prompto. There is nothing between them. “What do you—want to—”

“You're so put together most of the time,” Prompto says, and he grins, one that is perfectly organic on his face.

Noctis huffs, and waits.

“We can just do it like this, if you want,” he says, when Noctis says not a thing, and wields both their cocks with what seems to be put-on ease and sure hands. It shocks Noctis and wholly wins him over. Prompto hushes him. “I’ll do it, okay?”

Their flesh together creates a sound that embodies wetness. Unsure where to put his hands, Noctis settles for sliding them across Prompto’s jaw, caught up in the intimacy of the moment that he lets himself act as if they were more than they were.

It won’t hit him, until later, why he’s doing that. It will be longer before he accepts it.

 

*

 

When he stands in the graces of Leide he sees from one end of Eos to the other. It’s dizzying to fathom open space where everything flows uninterrupted by things like curving terrain and skyscrapers. He’s used to looking up and being met by the hulking halls of concrete, but here, he feels stripped down to his essence.

As they run, the king’s son and all his men could be anything. If he dreamt.

 

*

 

“Really hard to keep my eyes off you all day, to be honest,” Prompto says, before he gets on his knees.

He’s on his voyage to wed, and the only thing he can think about is his cock in Prompto’s mouth. It’s hurried and dirty and he loves it, from every inch off the ground from where the knobbly knees press in the ground and then there, his hands are with unyielding grip, and then after that Noctis’ hands hold the same strength and bunch in Prompto’s styled hair kissing his neck. Their two figures revolve around the inwards and outwards motion of hot wetness behind the back of Hammerhead.

There’s probably going to be desert dust between the creases of his skin, and they might just be risking too much, but the others are at one of the caravans that are older than Noctis and they’re painting photographs of the night sky. Or so they said they were. Noctis is intending to paint Prompto’s face with cum.

He thinks about the grand ceremony, his memory of Lunafreya’s face from a picture she sent in their shared journal, and her in a sleek dress handmade in Tenebrae. Her and her lovely moonface and graciousness and cold high insistence in what she believed in.

It’s terrible, but he comes close at the very juxtaposition of his mind’s eye and his physical eye: Luna walking down in pastel blue with practised composure, and Prompto’s mouth curling around him with potent sounds of tongue around skin, carresses of wet pinkness. He looks up with blond eyelashes and a bent jaw and Noctis can’t think.

Pulling off with an unavoidable pop, Prompto says, “You can push my head up against the wall.”

“What?” Noctis says, gloved hand fluttering over his stomach indecisively.

“Do it. You can do that to me.”

“Won’t you actually choke? Prompto…”

“I have no gag reflex.” Then he grins, and there’s saliva all around his mouth. “Besides, if I suffocate, at least I can say it was sucking on the prince of Lucis’ dick.”

Noctis doesn’t push Prompto’s head back, but he does grasp it after he leans back. “Tap on my leg if you want me to stop.”

Prompto nods, which is an awkward movement in his position, though it conveys what Noctis needs to know. Then with the tip he slides in slowly, and he never thought he’d be in this position. The only things he can fathom: the feel of Prompto’s hair, his mouth, how raw he is.

Then he thrusts, and pulls back, and their gaze meets and then he pushes back, in and out, in a manner that makes his body leave him for another city or time and the sand does not matter and the night could fall and he would be here, wanting to fold Prompto all around him and keep him.

Keeping the lock of their eyes even, Prompto wipes the cum off his face and he eats it. Noctis remains in his ownership.

“I wonder if they’ll suspect anything,” Prompto muses, finishing ridding the evidence, standing up with creaky knees as Noctis leans against the hard wall with jelly for legs.

“If we look guilty, they’ll figure it out.”

“And do you care if they do?”

Noctis hesitates, mouth open and breathing heavily like a dog, “I do.”

“Tough luck, then. You shoulda thought of that before we started banging.”

“Don’t call it _banging_.”

“Doing it like chocoboes. Having sex. Do you wanna call it _making love_?” Prompto snorts. “I think you’d have an aneurysm before you called it that.”

“Are you joking around?”

Prompto smiles. “C’mon, bro.”

Noctis lets his head loll back and he tries to regain himself. “How long do we have until we have to go back?”

“Fifteen minutes ‘til Iggy wanted us. Can you do me in less?”

“Depends how easy you are.”

“Ouch,” Prompto says, and unzips his jeans with practised nonchalance. It takes that for Noctis to realise his own are still undone.

He wouldn’t say he’s good at it, as intent as he gets at becoming good at something; he just knows how to make it good for Prompto, with recklessness and a lack in rhythm—fast and then slow, and then slipping out once or twice because he himself gets a bit too excited. He could feel his own hardness again if it didn’t come so quickly after he’d already ended himself, because there’s something about holding Prompto so delicately yet terribly that he feels like starting or beginning all over again.

“How were the stars tonight, Prompto?” Ignis asks, and that secret pervades the air with an unavoidable density.

“Oh, they were amazing! It’s so great what you can see out the city, y’know, because in Insomnia it’s all, smoggy, and like, out here, whoa! Didn’t get any pics though. Real shame, gonna…have another go tomorrow night,” Prompto responds, and Noctis wants to hide his head in the ground. There is no _way_ they can contain this, and it destroys him and all his selfish parts because he wants Prompto, and he gets the entirety Prompto or none of him. And he can give back so little.

 

 

### START

 

 

It's strange that Prompto acted like he hadn't known him already for three years when they greeted one another at the start of high school and its winding road before them, as if he hasn't memorised his face with the rest of the pupils he would glimpse as he wandered their old schoolgrounds himself.

He doesn't quite know what to do with himself, a little caught in the moment thinking about the fact that he'd made a friend, and somebody he already was fond of from afar.

But eventually, Prompto had approached him with a sunflower smile and Noctis is swept up, wanting to throw his head back and laugh, or listen deeply when Prompto mentions his photography with the shy hidden smile of an artist. There are so many things he'd like to interject, like, _I've only known you for a little while but you hardly treat me like a prince_ and _Your nose is a a button_ or _Do you play any games?_

There's so much rolling out beyond all the years he hasn't lived yet.

But, with a secret smile, he looks at Prompto, and doesn't mind.

There's a lot he'd like to begin with, properly. He doesn't know yet how much he'd like his jaw to not be stone, or who he'll be when he's older, because growing up is always a hard thing to fathom. It's never known how much one may change, become an adult, grow up and get a job and have kids, settle down. If being alive is really all that. He thinks settling down might be a tad boring, but he doesn't mind this easy normality, this living that's just breathing, and not panting and not choking.

 

 

*

 

He can’t change. His father’s death wraps around him as a silent silk cocoon of grief and then he sheds it, just as quickly. There is something he is meant to be. It is immutable. That does not mean he accepts it, not even for a moment, just yet.

 

*

 

He thinks about it, often. What it would be like to have Prompto inside him. Not a tongue or a finger.

Sometimes he considers how casually he goes about it, with the façade of carelessness and easiness of his friendship with Prompto, juxtaposed by the intensity of what they do otherwise. He can juggle both, live in this land between two where he commits to not one or the other. He consoles himself with the knowledge Prompto wants it, too, even if Noctis will never quite get to be anything but he’s fated to be.

He waits until they find a motel in their spiralling journey around Lucis, talks to Titan—stares down a thing he cannot understand. It’s like if he’s confused, he can return to the other body that knows him, and it will soothe that wavy hesitance.

“Wait,” Prompto says, sitting with his legs tucked under him on the double bed, “so _that’s_ what you were doing when you said you were gonna go—”

“Yes,” Noctis says, partly amused and also partly embarrassed, though he won’t let the latter show intentionally. Not that Prompto’s keen and knowledgeable gaze doesn’t discern it immediately.

“I should’ve known. You so rarely run off your own, Noct. Of course, except to buy lube and condoms.”

Noctis messes up his hair and pretends he didn’t very skilfully manage to locate the aforementioned items from a vendor long passed in Lestallum.

“If you’ve had this since we were last in Lestallum,” Prompto says, a little slowly and carefully, “then what were you doing in the meantime with it?”

“I think you can guess.”

“Does that mean you’re, you know. Now. I don’t need to do anything for you? Did you finger yourself waiting for me?”

The barrage doesn’t take Noctis off-guard, but the last question does. Because the answer is _yes._ They spent the whole day hunting and when he refused to camp, he had this in mind; when he showered, caked in dirt and rubbing harsh soap all over with hasty vigour, he had this in mind; when he put his responsibilities in a corner and thought about being bent over, it was Prompto. All over.

“That’s a yes,” Prompto says, and he actually smirks.

“You’re very sexually confident.”

“I feel confident with you.”

Noctis remembers. Then, in the twilight gloom of the room, he lets his knees sink into the bed when he pulls his briefs off. He didn’t bother getting dressed properly, before.

For a moment he sees something flash across Prompto’s face, a glitched movement of hesitance and lack of surety, but it’s followed by his mouth slightly opening and looking inviting and a tad wanton. He lifts a hand, and Noctis swallows. It traces from his hip around to his back, and they are so close together that he can see exactly the angle Prompto’s straw eyebrows furrow.

His hand follows the natural curve, and then limbre fingers find the lube-soaked spot that makes Noctis realise with heavy, ground-shattering realisation they’re going to do it. He’d worked himself up to it, for a while, practising the motion, in between the times where they slept in a tent with its lack of privacy.

“Do you know my favourite part?” Prompto asks, tenderly just drifting his hand over Noctis, not committing to anything.

“My ass?”

“That, too,” he says, and laughs—a strangely intimate thing, to laugh, as he holds Noctis like this. “No, I think I just like how we can be badass—mind the pun—all day and then we come back to _this_.”

After a moment of not really moving, Noctis says so lowly he thinks he isn’t heard, “Mine, too.”

Prompto kisses him. “Take your shirt off. You look dumb with your ass out but a top on.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I can just _go_ …”

“And share a room with Ignis and Gladio?” He slips a finger in, to emphasise the point: _like you could go in there with this all ready._

Noctis, arms once hanging as unsure weight, moves them to Prompto’s waist like retracted magnets. He doesn’t know what else to do with them, he and his hands. So he’s just soft. He lets his lips find Prompto and he likes to think they can take it quiet, for now, even if he just wants Prompto to push him into the bed.

With a bit of prodding, however, Noctis is pushed onto his bare back and he feels his legs bent towards his chest with the movement, as Prompto kneels before him, still fully dressed. He waits for Prompto’s undressing, the careful way he slips his vest off with its myriad patches and drapes it on a chair, follows with his tank and folds it as if it were precious, his pants, his boots. He puts consideration into all of it.

The way he handles his clothes and the things he owns is the way he handles Noctis: he cleans the chamber of a gun as he slips two fingers and three in with the same repetition. The protection is put on with fierce intention. Noctis can feel it.

He’s kissed again. The kisses they take are ones when nobody is looking and nobody knows these two elements can exist together as they do. The slide of Prompto into him is the sensation of being full twice over, with cock and revelation.

“I’m good,” he almost mumbles.

“You _are_ good.”

“You can’t,” he tries to say, and stutters a little for a moment, “start banter up when we’re doing this.”

He wins, because the hands wielding his hips and the waist he possesses with his calves tighten and tense, and Prompto is silent bar for a long, long exhale of breath. Their tongues welcome each other. It’s a kiss shared by two boys who don’t know what to do with themselves.

The pace picks up after the initial steadiness, and suddenly a rhythm is coaxed out and with the forward and backwards motion, Noctis’ hands drift around the narrowness of Prompto’s waist, stomach—he’s always there.

“Noct,” Prompto says, and there it is. The naming. Prompto’s feather treatment of sound and his name is enough to do Noctis in because he can only compare the boisterousness outside to the reverence inside. Inside the bedroom, inside Noctis.

He wants to completely let go, and he could. He could ascend to something else from this action alone, of simple sex and the whispers and gasps and names and pools of sweat collecting between them, under them, around them.

There will be an end. This is a knowledge he possesses through every push: one or both of them will cum and then it will be over, even if just for a second he feels like he’s dead and somewhere else. He can be anything else.

Amidst the sex and the fucking, Prompto kisses his forehead, trembling.

 

*

 

Between the city with its never-ending sound and crackle of life and the volume of the mind, he finds something like peace in the practice of fishing, in the lazy easiness of closing his eyes, in the mindless movement of muscle combining with the potential of a sword. He searches for those moments where he can stop, for even a moment, where he doesn’t have to be anything and just exists in flux.

Prompto makes him laugh, and he thinks: he wishes he could be something more.

He can’t. Something else has already made its shift.

 

*

 

Noctis notes that it is difficult to procure a room meant only for two when so often the norm for the four of them all was to get a combined deal.

It is also worth it.

So when bats and birds fly by and loop across the eaves and he settles himself down from odd-jobs and pretending the days were not shorter, he can feel the mattress below him and know that soon enough he’ll have Prompto all to himself.

There’s a fountain of glee at the thought and the secrecy of it. The fact that it’s Prompto, who giggles in the middle of combat and throws out a one-liner is the very one that's going to pound him into the mattress. He enjoys the duality of it, and it’s difficult to wean himself off it.

But it’s not into the bed today, and he almost thinks they didn’t need a separate room for this. They could do it in the woods against a wooden earthly tree or a rock that digs into his stomach, except it’s one wall in one town and there’s parts of himself opening up as a maelstrom.

There’s his arms pressing into the wallpaper and bottom half of his body jutting out and with each swift push he can feel the whole shock of the movement from his toes to his head. There’s nothing else he thinks about except Prompto’s hands consuming the cut of just his hips and then all his body parts, not having to touch, just having to be in the near vicinity and leave parts of himself all over.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart,” Prompto says into him, and the terms of endearment aren’t a stretch beyond _bro_ or _dude_ or _pal_ or _buddy_ and a slap on the shoulder except it’s a slap and snap of his own hips against Noctis, and it’s the same, but it’s not.

“Hey,” Noctis says, turning his head around to try and look at Prompto, “I’m not done.”

“I know, give me a minute,” Prompto says between a high-pitched wheeze and a billowing sigh.

“I don’t think I can wait a minute.”

“Oh, you _totally_ can.” He’s collapsed on top of Noctis but he manoeuvres away, leaving Prompto in the middle of his little death to sit on the bed. He raises his eyebrows expectantly and Prompto laughs.

It’s not long before he joins him with a topple and a grapple, and for a moment Noctis just holds Prompto.

“Do you wanna turn over?” Prompto says, and Noctis gets on his knees and elbows and tries not to guess what’s going to happen next.

Then there’s a tongue where his cock was. The sheets are a well-worn and scratchy, but Noctis slides his head down until his forehead is pressed into the red paisley pattern as the wetness of Prompto’s mouth mixes with the lube and the puckering tightness.

“I don’t know if that’ll be enough,” Noctis says, strained, almost as a challenge.

“Just wait,” Prompto removes himself to say before he returns, alternating with wandering fingers as well. Noctis feels everything and nothing all at once. It’s a drawn out pretty repetition of just standing on the brink of untouchable ecstasy except it’s not going to push him over. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by, or half an hour, or hours—Noctis can’t count, numb to time.

For a moment he almost thinks Prompto has left him, as there is emptiness behind him, until he hears the packaging of a condom ripped open again after the other was spent, and he then he gets it. “Told you. Twenty year old stamina,” Prompto teases.

“You don’t have to use one. Get on with it.”

“So pushy!” He pauses. “Hold on, no condom? Won’t you get…Noct up?”

“I thought we had sex education together. I guess my memory must be short.”

“Do you know what’s not short?”

Noctis has to muffle a laugh in response.

“My _you-know-what_.”

"No, I don't know," Noctis says, a spice of humour in his tone.

Then without further preamble, he gets on with it, and that familiar weight returns, the pulsing and the pushing. He could be wrapped in this forever and he would not mind.  But they’re building up to one climax or another, or both.

The pace is thunderous and rough, and occasionally it slows into a snail’s loving, and he’s moulding Noctis the way he’s moulding his ass, the way he’s all over him. So that’s the way it goes: Noctis almost becomes something else, in the ascension of sex.

When he does come with two hands and a bitten tongue, he falls floppy, and Prompto holds him. That’s when he realises what each time has held, and he hasn’t noticed it: the gentleness, the sweet forgiving kisses, the naming.

With heavy breathing and one arm around Prompto and the other around fate, Noctis lets himself pretend again. He gets it.

“Prompto?” he hesitantly says into Prompto’s chest, breath drifting over his shoulders.

“Yeah, buddy?”

Noctis opens his mouth and closes his eyes, feels the tie of a knot in his throat and thinks of things to calm himself, dreaming of the beat of sword slashes and the reasons he needs to talk. “I’m sorry,” he manages.

 

*

 

He’s watched Prompto grow.  Prompto is a person who lived with a shield of fairy floss and drifted with sweetness and this he knows is one of many layers. There is silver beneath, and Noctis, base and insolent thing he is, has dragged his feet through the rain and accepted the souls of the past if only for the reason he, maybe, could exist the same way: in the past.

As his whirling journey unfolds, Noctis falls into that final stage of acceptance. He has jumped between small acts of rebellion and refusing what he is born for and putting his gilt hat on and calling it a crown fit for a king.

Luna is dead. He is alone. The two statements are unrelated. Prompto is somewhere else, and it was his hands that had felt him softly and lovingly that toppled him off the brink. Which is the train, and also his heart.

All the magic in the world could not help, because it is as much apart of all that has come from the core of the planet which is going to be his end.

 

*

 

“So I told you the best part of this,” Prompto says, and here his voice is contrived, arms lacerated and covered in welts and his prim nose red raw. The barracks are swelling with dust and echoes. “Let me tell you the worst.”

“I thought there wasn’t a ‘this,” he says. There is a foot gap between them on the bunk. Gladio and Ignis speak in hushed voices, elsewhere, distant tethers rooting him to the spot.

“I think it’s pretty well established I’m as bad as you.”

“There’s not any part of you that’s bad, and if there is…” He thinks, and swallows. “Then I don’t think I’d mind anyway.”

“What a romantic.”

Noctis meditates on this between the bruised parts and yawning space that had been between them and still exists. Negative space, as a concept, wrapping around them. He will fight until the bitter end.

He just doesn’t know what that fight is for.

“I guess the worst part is, if I could have you,” Prompto says eventually, cradling his right handed wrist, "then it would mean I'd never want you to be anything but yourself. I can't change this."

"This?"

"A lot of things. The obvious ones," he continues, the ever-present cuff being fidgeted with appearing as a nervous habit. "You, king of the land...me."

"You?"

“You’ll probably find out.”

That cryptic mark hangs, and everything unfinished lurks as cobwebs in the corner of the room they ignore. There is a suggestion lurking in amongst the debris, and it’s like he knows, or he’s become a seer, because he feels like this can never be broached. From here, it’s to the Crystal, and then it’s the darkness drowned land. It’s one thing folding into the next.

A hero grows in their journey. He is being dragged backwards.

Without warning, Prompto puts his spindly arms around Noctis, and it feels like it’s more for his own comfort than Prompto’s. It’s ironic.

“I think you’re the one who needs a hug,” he jokes, like they always do, but for the first time in a long time it doesn’t work. The laughing and the jesting and the pretending isn’t working and he’s stripped to his bare, not even naked.

“We’re not having sex, ‘kay? Keep it in your pants.”

“I’ll try.” He doesn’t have to. Since they started and ended whatever it was, the thing he’s missed most is the tenderness. The way his hand will skim around Prompto and find a safe, warm place, and he can learn the shift of his legs and the noises he makes when he’s trying not to laugh because for the second time his dick has slipped out of Noctis’ ass. It’s the simplicity. “I missed you,” he adds.

Prompto lifts and tilts his head off from the crevice in the inviting shoulder of Noctis’, and he seems to be appearing to think. “If you could be any different, what’d you do?”

“That’s an interesting question,” he answers, though he has no real one. “I guess I liked being normal."

“Some people don't want normal."

"Some people aren't me."

“Gladio'd tell you off for this."

"He loves a good family argument," Noctis says.“What does that make him? The grumpy grandpa?”

Noctis can’t really care for the boundless shadow. “That’s it. Crotchety and complaining about the entitled youth of today,” Prompto says, and he chuckles. For whatever situation they’d got themselves into before and were in now, he can’t say he doesn’t like this.

He has a happy middle, at least, if not ending.

 

*

 

Even as he loses himself the vicious blue vortex, the soul of the land and the one that will subsume him in a wholly different way to the love he thought he had, he knows this: he is meant for ruin. His cultivated, inherent nature: to be unchangeable. To dig his feet into the ground when he needed to be pushed.

This is his tale, boy frozen.

 

 

**END**

 

 

The gradual, overarching descent is punctuated by the freezing of moments that stand apart from running and fighting and dying. They are attempts at transformation, of trying to push him to the edge and become something else that might be free.

There is a long path before and behind him, and as he looks at Eos, the land of dawn, living in shadow—he knows what choreography to follow, formula written in his bones.

The steps had held their weight once, when their journey had started, when everything had begun to slot into place for the prince's hurtling journey to begin. Now it held them with only one surety: it had come to an end, full circle, as all things end the same in oblivion.

His thundering humanity and knowledge of mortality have done their best to push him back, tell him to back away from the precipice. But this is the only way, after all.

After all. Everybody else deserves their own ending, eventually.

Except he cannot stop himself asking, in the throes of contemplation of mortality—twenty years of short life, ten years stolen in crystalline stasis, is that all there was? A goodbye on the steps. He never will know what it is to be old, hands carved with lines of experience, and hair greying to the bend of time. A home with lazy mornings. A place to put his sword down, and rest his head, and reverently let his memories bid him sleep. To travel without a plan, just a map.

He doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes before he dies. He sees the life that had slipped out of his hands before he even knew what weight was in them.

Their eyes meeting, Prompto and Noctis are separated by: the things they must do, the things they have chosen to do, and the person Prompto has become. There is one thing simmering between them, still, even in the absence, the amorphous yet encompassing part of each other they can never refuse because it, unlike the rest, refused to let anything control it or tell it what to do.

“Do you?” Prompto questions, knowing already what Noctis is thinking after he holds the weight of Ignis’ and Gladio’s stares.

The others do not know the brevity of the query. Nobody does, not when that question spans ten years back and surprises Noctis that Prompto even remembers it.

“Well,” he says, with a half-sad smile, “maybe next time I’ll let you know.”

“Okay,” Prompto plays along. Then he, too, half-smiles, a full one between them if they’re added together. “If you could do it all again? Would you do it the same, Noct?”

This is something he can only say to him, but he cannot walk down those steps of fate with the weariness befitting a king and his kingdom. There is a bittersweet tilt to his lips which pledges to their hushed and cheated existence, and he says—

 

 

∞

 

"I'd tell you this." He is the moss and the dirt and the far-off gushing of bird's cries. With one arched eyebrow and a thin press to his lips, Prompto is paitent and anticipatory. The sun will set in two hours, its cycle corrupted, and he contemplates the nature of the self-assuring system of Eos, where one thing will work in unison with another to preserve its own existence. There are worms buried deep beneath his feet in the rolling hills of Duscae and fossils of billions of years of creation and Luna's hands, soil-stained from the ground, are just the same as he: as any hill or valley, or predator to prey, growth and death. He exists somewhere in between.

He'd tried to fight against it, for a couple of heartbeats, but like all things, nature reclaims everything, and everything exists in fragments coupled together.

"I like you just the way you are," he finishes, and he watches Prompto's eyes flick away, the sad yet sweet tilt to his lips, the one that comes before the rest.

 

**Author's Note:**

> writing this was like eating glass, but in the best way.
> 
> being able to share a work & bond over this universe is really one of the reasons i write fanfic, so comments are 100% appreciated and loved.
> 
> you can say hello to me on @ https://twitter.com/4chanpriest, where i'd love to hear from you if you want to come chat to me about FFXV. (:
> 
> i can't wait to share with you what next i have to post. so much on the list, but here's one more off it.  
> xxx  
> thank you.


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